What is the role of the internet in politics and during campaigns and what is the role of large amounts of user data in all of this?

In the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign the Democrats were again more successful than the Republicans in utilizing online media for mobilization, co-ordination, fundraising and micro-targeting. Social media and the Internet play a fundamental role in political campaigns. However, technical research in this area has been surprisingly limited and fragmented.

The goal of this workshop, held at CIKM 2013 in Burlingame/San Francisco, is to bring together researchers working at the intersection of social network analysis, computational social science and political science, to share and discuss their ideas in a common forum; and to inspire further developments in this growing, fascinating field of computational political science.

The workshop topics include

Classifying users according to political leaning
Classifying web queries and web pages according to political leaning
Discovering political topics from search logs and social media data
Describing and quantifying political campaigns and their effect on online media
Influence of political fact checking (e.g. Politifact) on rumor spreading
Visualizing political issues and other socio-economic controversies
Applying sentiment analysis to find positive/negative aspects of issues
Quantifying the effects of a "Daily Me" in political search and content
Prediction markets for election prediction


The workshop will include Rayid Ghani, former Chief Scientist at the Obama for America 2012 campaign, as a keynote speaker, a panel discussion with scientists and media experts, as well as presentations of accepted contributions. The schedule will provide time for both organized and open discussion.